RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Self-examination is important. It is healthy to try to understand why we believe this or that, why we like this person but not another. Since my support for the President is controversial, even among those who agree with me in other matters, I thought a public self-examination would be welcome.

Ado Annie Cairns would never have fallen for Donald Trump. He doesn’t talk “purty.” He is the antithesis of me, of the way I was brought up, the way I live my life. His clothes are too fancy, and I don’t like the way he dyes his hair. He loves money and power and does not seem interested in history or philosophy. He butchers the English language when he speaks. I doubt he reads Trollope. He is boastful in a way I hope I am not. I would have no interest in living the life he has lived. Nor would he want to live mine.

So, why do I like and support him? Why do I feel he was what the Country needed in 2016 and again in 2020? He has an intuitive sense, I believe, of what troubles America. I doubt he has read much American history or is familiar with our Constitution. I am sure he has never read the Federalist Papers. But he has an instinctual understanding of people.

All societies create ruling classes. I was a beneficiary of that, in that my family were prominent in the last half of the 19th Century and into the early years of the 20th. It was a time when the Country was governed by white, Anglo Saxon Protestants, WASPs as they are lovingly called. That era began to decline slowly in the years after World War II and a new class took the reins – technocrats, bureaucrats, educators, scientists, and businesspeople, David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. They came from all walks of life, represented all races, religions and sexes. They helped lift up the Country after fifteen years of depression and war. They built highways and put man on the moon. They desegregated schools and offered equal opportunities to women. They won the Cold War without firing a shot.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=500c3266cd

Back on April 2, when the $2+ trillion “CARES” Act had just cleared Congress, I issued a warning to “make no mistake — this is a perilous moment.” The country had reached seemingly unanimous consensus that all previous budget constraints no longer apply to federal government spending. After all, we are in a crisis. Therefore we must spend “whatever it takes” — a term with no definition and no limits. With all sensible judgment now thrown to the winds, this would be the perfect time for the well-connected and the corrupt to swoop in to grab the extra tens of billions they have long lusted after.

And of course, this is exactly what has happened. Every thoroughly corrupt left-wing priority — from wind power subsidies to teachers union contracts — has its lobbyists there in Washington trying to get in on the next handout (aka “stimulus”) gravy train. As a Manhattan Contrarian public service, I thought I would look around to find a candidate for the very most completely corrupt and unsupportable demand for a bailout among the hundreds of such demands currently swirling around the Washington firmament.

Although it’s a crowded field, I have a candidate that will be difficult to top. On April 14, a guy named Don Harmon — Democrat and member of the Illinois State Senate, and recently elevated to the position of President of the that body — wrote a letter to Dick Durbin — Illinois federal Senator and member of the Democratic leadership of that body — laying out what the state of Illinois is seeking in the next round of federal “stimulus.” This letter is the very definition of the term “brazen.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/04/covid19_death_rates_among_blacks_make_new_fodder_for_racial_politics.html

As reported by ABC News, black American coronavirus patients in Michigan died of the disease at more than eight times the rate of white people despite making up only 14% of the state’s population.  Similar death disparities occurred in other U.S. cities with large black populations, thus creating an opening for racial politics to be injected into the debate over COVID-19 death rates in the black community.

At the Coronavirus Task Force press briefing on April 7, Dr. Anthony Fauci correctly observed that black Americans are disproportionately affected by illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, and asthma, all of which are known to increase the risk of fatal coronavirus complications.  The widely respected epidemiologist went on to note that such disparities have “long been prevalent in the African-American community.”  With higher coronavirus death rates among black Americans an established medical fact, progressive media outlets are raising the specter that racism is to blame.

The suggestion that the medical profession is rife with racist doctors and nurses is an unfortunate extension of the modern Democratic Party’s identity politics election strategy, which is predicated on the fallacious narrative that even after all the years of racial progress, the America of today is an incurably oppressive place infested with racists who roam the land, including in hospitals and medical facilities that care for all Americans, regardless of the color of their skin. 

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/23/white-house-should-shift-to-economic-recovery-briefings/

Most Americans don’t want more government hand-outs or debt-inducing programs. We want to protect the vulnerable, strengthen our health care capacity, and move on before the damage is too great to repair.

The so-called Murray model on COVID-19 issued yet another update on Wednesday, its 11th iteration in less than a month

Even though his apocalyptic projections about massive shortages of hospital beds, intensive care units, and ventilators failed to materialize this month, Dr. Chris Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, keeps upping the ante. It was Murray’s collection of scary graphs that Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx presented to the president at the end of March to support their push to extend the “social distancing” guidance until April 30. President Trump acquiesced; that decision effectively shut down the U.S. economy, has confined most Americans to house arrest, and is fueling fear and panic across the land.

After being so wrong, any professional with a sliver of integrity would crawl away in shame. Murray should be offering an apology to the nation for warning of widespread death and misery which, outside of New York City, cannot be found on anything like the scale he predicted. The president should be hauling Murray and his abettors into the White House to demand answers.

But being a scientific modeler means never having to say you’re sorry—see climate science for a lengthy list of examples—so Murray is not only unrepentant, he’s spinning out more imaginary charts.

Republican governors who either never enacted draconian social distancing decrees or are planning to end those measures are on Murray’s latest hit list. Florida and Arizona, whose Republican governors want to liberate their states gradually in a few weeks, should not be permitted to lift social distancing measures until the middle or end of June, Murray says.

The residents of North Dakota will have to wait until after July 4 to celebrate their freedom. Governor Doug Burgum, a Republican, never instituted a stay-at-home order and is preparing plans for businesses to open on May 1 so Murray has pushed back North Dakota’s safe date to July 19. (The state has had 17 COVID-19 fatalities.)